stalton

Cubs 89 Brewers 89 Cards 88 P Rats 81 Reds 77

FWIW Coopers 6.8 WAR season was 6/0.8 split. Prince did have an offensive WAR season better than Cooper

Going by best season WAR on bref, we have: (skipping until all positions are covered) Robin Yount SS 1982 10.5 WAR Carlos Gomez CF 2013 7.8 WAR Ryan Braun LF 2011 7.7 WAR Christian Yelich RF 2018 7.6 WAR Tommy Harper 3B 1970 7.4 WAR Cecil Cooper 1B 1980 6.8 WAR Jonathon Lucroy C 2014 6.6 WAR Paul Molitor 2B 1982 6.2 WAR Teddy Higuera 1986 9.4 WAR Mike Caldwell 1978 8.2 WAR Ben Sheets 2004 7.2 WAR Chris Bosio 1989 5.5 WAR Ben McDonald 1996 5.4 WAR Rollie Fingers 1981 4.1 WAR Corey Knebel 2017 3.7 WAR JJ 2018 3.4 WAR

Speaking from a point of ignorance, aren't most huge contracts insured?

Does that mean the Tv's in the concourse will be on a 8 second delay? That's lame if that's true.

Irritability being a side effect of one of my new meds makes me well...Irritated

Are we supposed to send flowers or something? I'd settle for a (world series) ring!

No disagreements by the end of RRR's tenure. But in 2011 I thought he did a great job. The fact that he gave Shawn Marcum 3 playoff starts was horrendous and season ending for us. That would have been like giving Chase Anderson 3 playoff starts this season. Instead we left him off the playoff roster completely, which was the obvious move for Marcum in 2011. I agree with the comparison, but I seem to recall not having many options left available to us during the playoffs. Also I just found out that Grandal had a higher WAR that Harper last year

Great article. Mid-tier free agents are getting screwed because they are not getting the 80 million dollar contracts that Mike Leake and Wei-Yin Chen just got a few years ago. Since signing the contract, Leake has a 4.32 ERA, 3.96 FIP, 1.30 WHIP and 95 ERA+ and Chen has a 4.75 ERA, 4.38 FIP, 1.28 WHIP and 80 ERA+. Leake will probably be about a 1 bWAR/season player over the life of this contract and Chen could easily wind up in negative bWAR territory. If anything this shows that MLB owners and GMs have stopped drinking the mid-tier free agent Kool-Aid with many of these players. Another thing I noticed in the article is that his groupings only have 40 contracts over 5 years. One big contract or a couple of hometown discounts (Re Moose) will vastly alter the numbers. He talks about a 50% dropoff in 2016-2017 when there was only 4 contracts that meet his criteria. 4 contracts does a trend not make. Edit Also, his range of 1.5 to 3.5 WAR is a big gap. If players closer to 3.5 WAR sign those numbers should be a significant higher than players closer to 1.5 WAR

One thing that sticks out to me is that like our "out getters" we can use our depth to our advantage. Whether it's platooning, playing the hot hand, injuries, or an unseen drop in effectiveness, the Brewers are covered in a lot ways. This signing, in my opinion, makes the team better. Gone are the days of 2013 where we trotted out the likes of Bianchi, Schafer and BF favorite Yuni because we had no other options.

I'm approaching my official 10 year BFverssary this June and that's not including all the lurking I did before I signed up. Where has the time gone?

I seem to remember hearing that the majority of the pitching market last year was waiting on the elite few to sign and then when they finally did, there was not an immediate glut of signings rather it slowly came in after that.

I have the same feeling about a certain person starting in the playoffs in C.F. in 2011

I agree but there is a difference between Cephus done with Wisconsin and Wisconsin done with Cephus. Unless, you happened to be from Soviet Union. That being said, I hope he truly is innocent.

There is a few places I could put this but coming from a very graph and analytical background, combined with a long week, beer and no wife tonight, led me to crunching some numbers. Like others that have expressed the same or similiar sentiment, the pay scale and the talent scale (I'm using WAR from FG, so usual caveats apply) are not matching and seem to be falling further apart. For example, I took the top 50 WAR producing catchers, 2018. I got their age, salary (either taken from FG or Spotrak) and WAR. I picked catchers, because I wanted to eliminate the most cross position players as possible, but I realize taking WAR for catchers leaves a lot of intangibles out there. I didn't expect a linear response but was surprised by a few things. First off average age and mean age were similiar, pretty close to 29.5 years. I expected that. The average salary was 4.4 Mil while the mean salary was closer to 2 mil flat. This induces a bell curve heavy on the right side. That seems logical to me. The top few salaries are really going to put a skew in there, combined with the min salaries as well. The Average WAR was 1.2 while the mean WAR was only 0.9. That to me makes a bit of sense but in order to see that clearer, I wanted to see the quartiles. Which were 0.6 and 2. So 50% of the top 50 catchers were between .6 and 2. Choosing the Top 50 was a bit arbitrary but I had to cut off the list somewhere. FWIW the top 50 catchers had a WAR close to 60 overall and the overall total WAR for all of MLB was only 50 WAR so there were plenty of bad catchers out there. There were even 4 teams that had a negative WAR from their catching staff. The average team as a whole averaged out 1.6 WAR total. Catchers certainly don't play anywhere close to 162 so I'll believe it. Crunching the initial numbers gave me 5mil/WAR for the average and only 2.1 mil/WAR for the mean. Since this is driven by salaries which are already right skewed, it makes sense that this is also right skewed. Breaking down the salaries, 22 of the Top 50 made 1 mil or less and only averaged 1.0 WAR 15 of the Top 50 made between 1mil and 5 mil and averaged 1.2 WAR 6 of the Top 50 made between 5 mil and 10 mil and averaged 1.6 WAR 7 of the Top 50 made over 10 mil and averaged just only 1.4 WAR A few things jump out at me. First the "2nd tier paid players" out WAR'ed the elite paid catchers. Small sample alert and all that but I would think given the "overpay" philosophy" for some of the elite players, this struck me as odd. Examining the parity of the catchers combining the data, 37 catchers made under 5 million but still had a WAR around 1.1 13 catchers were paid over 5 mil but had a WAR around 1.5 I know others on here use different models in evaulating trades, prospects and whatnot, but looking at the Salary per WAR the parity grows stronger. Overall all for the top 50 catchers, the average Salary per WAR was almost 5 WAR. The mean was a measly 2.1 mil Under a Million Salary per WAR was 0.9 1mil to 5 mil Salary per WAR was 4.0 5mil to 10 mil salary per WAR 8.1 Over 10 mil Salary was a whopping 17.4 Age can play alot into it was well, for all the phenoms out there you have the Molinas in the world that are still lterally outproducing catchers almost half his age. I tried getting a regression but age and WAR but the computer laughed at me. Looking at age and salary shows a different story. With a few exceptions of some older vets taking vet mins, the older you are the more money you make. What all this boils down to is (in completely my opinion), numbers can you alot of things and nothing at the same time. In a performance based industry, the pay scale and performance scale just don't measure up. I don't have any solutions but whether its collusion or the Front Offices dont want to pay more for something they can much cheaper, it appears that the math can show that it might not make financial sense to unload top dollars for an elite player when the results aren't linear. PS FWIW Pina and the Brewers had a catcher WAR of 1.1 while essentially just paying 1 mil in minimum contracts. Now that the Brewers signed Grandal, he certainly won't get 18 WAR but if he and the Brewers get 3WAR from catchers while paying 20 mil, is it worth it? 2.5 WAR, 2 WAR? I don't know. Time for another beer.

I would almost wonder if our backup OFs is better than Cleveland's starting OF

After working for a small company (5 FTE) for almost 9 years,the company went belly up and is no longer in business. It seems I need to dust off my resume.

Serious question, does tagging included in defensive metrics?

Josh, I know you have said in the past that you don't deal much with other agents, but have you had any experience with Scott Boras?

Between his comments and Buster Posey's yesterday, the Giants clubhouse seems to rival the Cardinals for total number of sticks up butts. Can number of sticks up butts be a new analytical tool please?

I love incentive laden contracts. I wish there were more of these.

Wow! What a tool!

I havnt spent much time paying attention. What does a defensive consultant do besides consult on defense?

This thread has got me wondering if anybody has looked at FA signing date, predicted stats and actual stats. I think back to alot of last year's FA pitchers who got off to abysmal starts. I know position players have a little bit more time but I would imagine the late signings would dampen things.

The DL name change thread got me thinking of other things that get called by their previous name. For example I have always called the thin metal roll used for cooking tin foil and I still have to roll up my car windows.